Search thoughts

Hey, I was hoping to get some ideas on improving a sites search. Currently I have two - not a lot but I've been thinking about this for a few minutes. Currently the site in question uses a very basic LIKE in MySQL, eg %blah%, but naturally this finds terms such as hjkblahbjkk - which is not desired. Or such matches should be ranked lower than something that matches the exact word blah. My thoughts are using a points system, eg assigning 5 points for an exact word match, 1 for a partial match. And then ordering the search results by the total points assigned. Either that or using external search code and not worrying so much. Cheers. -- Richard Heyes